The Golden Age of Design in Startups

http://bokardo.com/archives/the-golden-age-of-design-in-startups/

42 14 15 years ago

Does 'Golden Age' imply that it's at a peak right now? I think this will only accelerate. Design-focus is as much of a competitive advantage as having a star-hot technical team.

oneplusone• 15 years ago

I just don't believe this. Companies are just not willing to pay for it. I can easily get a 50% increase in pay as a developer. If they really had a hard time hiring designers they would give salaries comparable to developers.

Personally I am giving up on design. I will still be doing design, but for personal enjoyment. My next job will most likely be a full-time development position.

rdouble• 15 years ago

It depends on where you live. Designers in New York make as much as the developer. Especially if you can actually do a bit of the technical stuff yourself.

Front end designer/programmer hybrids are very highly paid. Likewise with iOS.

Having a design background can be a more flexible career as you can go work in fashion/media/publishing. It's also a lot easier to pick up contract work with definite endpoints.

mbesto• 15 years ago

The problem is that it's much easier to quantify a developer's output. Does that dropdown include all 50 states? Great, here you get paid. Do people using the dropdown know that its to enter a state? Well one guy says, "ya duh" and the other says "hmm not really".

schraeds• 15 years ago

It's also much easier for the skills of a developer to become commoditized for many of the same reasons. When what is needed and delivered is so easily quantified, it is also easier to find another provider of said services.

What makes a skilled designer so rare and desirable is the fact that they will bring up issues and concepts that may not even have been thought of until their input was garnered.

davejazz3• 15 years ago

This is all about what you define a designer as. For me a designer who isn't knee deep in code and data driven rich UX is useless.

Also, I think it's so boring and limiting to keep talking about such deep separations between skillsets.

It's all so simple: Good generalists/polymaths are more useful than one or the other.

Anyone who buckets themselves into an either/or is doomed to a limited career. Anyone who just says fuck it and does it all and keeps trying until they get it right is a far more useful asset.

So it's simple; this is not a golden age of designers, it's a golden age for smart multi-talented cross-skilled people. As it always has been and always will be. No amount of chirruping from one side of the fence or the other will change that. - If you are on a side of the fence then you are already limited.

rodolphoarruda• 15 years ago

I totally agree, but I see more job openings describing hyper-specialists than "smart multi-talented cross-skilled people". Maybe who posted the job opening is like that, and he or she doesn't like competition around. Once I lost an opportunity just because I didn't know what a particular acronym stood for. It was said the acronym was a prerequisite for the job.

davejazz3• 15 years ago

I guess I'm talking from a founder perspective. It's this 'design co-founder' focus that suddenly people are imaginating out of the sky.

What does design focus mean? Does it mean that it looks pretty or that it loads quickly? Because if it's just looks pretty then great, you have a co-founder for pretty looking stuff who doesn't know how to incorporate the company, do share options, hammer out some SQL, connect to an API, fire off some marketing emails, make the app scale well, call up some lawyers, write a privacy policy and evaluate seven different authentication mechanisms... I guess I don't get what a design cofounder is. What is he/she?

The most successful startup will have: AN EXPERT IN EVERYTHING.

So we've moved from focusing on tech founders to saying 'oh thank god we're finally focused on design'.

Bullshit! It's always been important, it always will be, this stinks of people connecting invisible threads to make an argument for a particular type of person which I would seriously question the validity of in a real boot strapping environment.

Tech startup founder: You code, you hack, you chat, you design, you build, you forget to sleep, you sleep too much, you get drunk, you build some more. Cherry picking individual skillsets out of that as a golden child or focus is just blog filling nonsense.

cateye• 15 years ago

Misleading article. Since when is Android founded by designers? Youtube is founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. Only Chad has studied Fine Art etc.

So, please stop starting an article full of misleading information.

sgdesign• 15 years ago

Blame the designer fund: http://designerfund.com/

Oh wow, FeedBurner! A company known far and wide for its amazing design sense and its delightful user interface!

danishkhan• 15 years ago

I would agree that in recent years designers are becoming a lot more important and having a good designer as part of your team is probably more important than having the right business guy or sales guy in the beginning. I'm not sure if I would say that it is the Golden Age of Design though. Developers are still a little more important than designers I would believe at least at the early stage of a company.

startupfounder• 15 years ago

Design is a game changer.

We design the world around us in everything we do. We design friendships, companies, culture, products and vision. Everyone is a designer.

I think it is the golden age of design awareness. Design is the look, but also the feel and texture of the product and company.

Look out your window or walk down the street. We live in a designed world. Even if you are walking in the woods, miles away from civilization the fact that the area has been untouched is an aspect of design. Someone designed policy or designed a national park to save this area.

What this "Golden Age of Design in Startups" means is that we have to embrace this cultural awareness of design and bring it into our company's everyday life. Design intentionally is really what it comes down to.

The Golden Age of Design in Startups

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